From the circus to the runway: how the ‘glam clown’ has seized the fashion zeitgeist

By Anna-Sophie Jürgens, Senior Lecturer in Science Communication at the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and Founder of Popsicule, ANU’s Science in Popular Culture and Entertainment Hub, Australian National University

For centuries, clowns occupied an ambiguous cultural position. They were comic figures, but also disruptive ones: tricksters who mocked authority and social conventions, picaresque mischief-makers who challenged canons of elegant appearance through their own distinctive, subversive style.

The 19th century French mime Jean-Gaspard Deburau transformed the melancholic white-faced Pierrot into a modern icon of theatrical artifice and fashionable alienation.…

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